Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of Volume 16 of the Journal. We have been somewhat delayed in our publishing programme, which is the result of the review process. The peer review process is paramount to academic publishing; without it, there is no guarantee of the veracity and quality of the material published. One problem that the world faces at the moment is that so much of the information on the Information Superhighway of the internet is not peer-reviewed; journalists and bloggers put out their assertions without review. In many cases, that is okay because there is no intention to deceive, even although the sincerity with which false information is presented matters little in terms of the amount of damage it does. However, we have far too many examples of deliberate and intentional publishing of false information with an agenda. It is a particular problem in journalism but holds true for blogging as well. We have a British Prime Minister who, in his days as a journalist, published a whole series of news stories about stupid things that the EU was doing, all of which were fabrications on his part (Purnell 2011, 115–128; Henkel 2018, 88; Rankin and Waterson 2019; Greenslade 2020). We have bloggers who present information that is false to push an anti-vaccination agenda (e.g. tayswaymovement.com. au [now defunct]), or to stoke up nationalist tensions (e.g. The Right Stuff [neo-Nazi, USbased]; DPNI [Russian nationalist website linked to a range of nationalist blogs]; Infowars [far right, British-based]). One of the most important things about academic publication is that there are safeguards in the form of peer review to make sure that the information being published is accurate, evidence-based, and not fabricated. Journalists would say the same of their work, but one of the differences between academic publication and journalism is the requirement for academic work to be grounded in the body of knowledge, based on quantifiable data rather than anonymous sources, and as objective as it is possible to be. This puts a lot of responsibility on the peer reviewers, who are the bastion against falsified data and poor scholarship. It doesn’t always work, and there are occasions where papers have to be retracted years after publication because it has emerged that the data has been falsified. However, these cases – while inevitably high profile – are the exception. By and large, the system works. It works because of the expertise and diligence of the reviewers, who are the unsung heroes of academic publishing. They work anonymously, for no reward, and are expected to do reviews as part of the long list of activities that demonstrate collegiality and esteem. Not unexpectedly, as the requirements of the academic workplace constantly increase, the peer review task becomes less and less attractive as an academic activity. When workloads are so massive, an optional extra like reviewing is one of the first things to go. However, without review, academic publishing ceases to be as authoritative as it should be, and it risks drifting into a grey area where it has no greater standing than a blog or a piece of journalism. One obvious solution would be to make a financial reward, but that could undermine the process somewhat by making it financially driven. Furthermore, that is an issue for publishing companies, and it JOURNAL OF CONFLICT ARCHAEOLOGY 2021, VOL. 16, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/15740773.2021.2037271